Garden of Thought

Wow, what a year amiright? I was stuck in my old house until September with my hubby holed up in the new house because he wanted to isolate while he worked on it and on his online job. This was okay, actually, if frustrating for me as I fretted over the new house's yard getting overgrown and whined about not getting to see the spring or summer flowers so I still don't really know what this yard has in it. BUT I was with my daughter and son-in-law in the old house which also needed work, and got to be there for her through her Expectation, as we are expecting a wee one in just a couple weeks here.

In Sept my hubby decided to head back to our little condo in CA to continue his hermitage so I was finally able to move furniture in and be Home. For about a week. Then our state caught fire and I had to go back to the old house which had a functional climate system unlike the unfinished new one. A couple weeks later, I could finally return so I've really only been "Home" for 2 months though we bought the house over a year ago.

Got a lot of work done on it in that time, and there's more in progress (the saga of the bathroom floor, the epic tale of the woeful furnace ducting, the gripping tale of the bedroom ceiling...)

And now we find they may induce my daughter a little early (still very close to due though, so not preemie time) meaning I am lurching into Grand level life very soon indeed. Next weekend, if all goes as planned (or as planned as such things can be). Time to roll up my sleeves and help a clueless young couple figure out which way is up on a baby!

Hope all is well with everyone out there, I've barely been online so I feel like I've lost track of a lot of you, bless you all.

Our house weirdly came with two furnaces (one at either end) so we are in the process of notching the foundation and connecting the two ducting networks to make only one furnace. Where the second was pulled out is the perfect spot for a small pantry instead SO I decided that would be the uber-bright snap of color spot since it is only seen when putting away or fetching groceries. This project took me sooo long to do... My own fault for so many colors, all needing multiple layers and touch-ups.
Starting off... random outlining mostly. My only concrete idea was one oversized flower in it.




Details sloooowly filling in:

Sellers just agreed to our repair list and our loan is ticking along through the credit union just fine so I got excited and ordered address labels (hey, they better not change anything now! I ordered, y'know, ADDRESS LABELS). Heh.

Yippy! I get to pick out new paint and carpet! Aaargh! I have to find new paint and carpet that I actually like! What's with all these weird muddy colors out there? Why is so much interior decorating stuff the color of baby food or dirt?

I spent the day dredging stuff out of our lean-to and greenhouse, spreading half-full bags of fertilizer and dirt and such here and there around the property just to get rid of them, yippy! I am the Dirt Fairy! Aargh, why in heaven's name did I save so many plastic pots? I threw some away, others I think I'll take to the local nursery and see if they want to repurpose them. But really - SO. MANY. POTS. If the zombie apocolypse starts this month and the zombies can be held off by putting pots on their heads, I have us covered.

And what do I do with the entire front end of a truck? I'll have to find out where large metal thingys go. Then there's the giant pile of brush and branches that will have to be chipped... dear me. God bless people who are moving, we need all the help we can get.

Found a house! (been looking for nearly two years now) and made an offer - and now it's accepted and now we're going "Yay! Oh no! Yay! Oh dear! Yay! Oooooh boy look at all the things we have to do! Yay! Aaaargh! Yay!....."

I love the house though the kitchen is a little smaller than I would like, now the inspection has to happen this next week and I have to pray they don't find any 'deal-breakers' in that. It's so wonderfully funky, a mid-century modern with hexagonal living room and a fireplace tower going up to a cupola in the middle of it, an angled courtyard with a little waterfall into a small koi pond, an outdoor fireplace, a pergola with wisteria over it... aaaaa! It's difficult to wait for all the details and papers to work their way through now.

My husband liked to juggle but hasn't done it much recently, so when I came across our old basket of koosh balls I thought I'd sort through them. Discovered the really old ones were getting brittle as the rubber had aged, kind of like old rubber bands, so when they were tossed they shed little bits of koosh everywhere. Threw the guilty ones into the wastebasket and forgot about it.

Woke up in the middle of the night to an unearthly glow coming from the wastebasket in my room. Half-asleep me was a bit wigged out for a moment before tracking it to a glow-in-the-dark koosh down among its brethren gamely lighting up their resting place; a kooshy apparition of koosh-balls past. I am half-inclined to keep it and do something with all the glow-in-the-dark rubber bits now if I could think of anything creative with them - any suggestions?

Where yesterday was spent in a never-ending cycle of battling the incoming rainwater, today was a never-ending packing, hauling and moving furniture to pull up the carpet.  36 u-haul boxes of books later we wrangled the bookcases into the garage and then started in on furnishings.  More to do tomorrow.  Every muscle in my body aches and I had to crawl up the stairs to go to bed, this is ridiculous. 

Wherever I go in the future, I hope it will NOT have a basement.  Or be by a river.  Or under a waterfall.  Or in a fishbowl.

Our offer was accepted and in 30 days we'll have a condo in the San Diego area!  It's a relief to have that part done, and though I seriously hate what this does to our debt load for now I'm hopeful we will at least get our money back out of it down the road instead of just throwing it down the gaping hole of Rent. Hubby is very happy that he will have a garage (albeit a tiny one) instead of just a carport and some eucalyptus trees around for greenery.  He's quite homesick for greenery.

Hubby's new job down in San Diego is going well and he managed to get his car registered, set up a PO Box and find his way around the fancy-schmancy coffee machine at this work ("It even grinds the beans! I love this thing!").  Now we get to the super-expensive part of this and that means housing.  He's now shopping for a small condo that we can re-sell later on to try to get some of our money back out after this southern adventure - and YOIKS housing is predictably expensive no matter what you do.

We have one likely one he's going to try for tomorrow, a one-bedroom in a reasonable neighborhood with the bonus of a small garage that can be closed and locked instead of only a carport, I really, really, really, really hate going into debt with another mortgage but it is still way cheaper than trying to rent.  Bleah!  On the good side, he's content with a classic Guy place - he doesn't care what color the carpet is, is happy with whatever window coverings it comes with and needs only minimal furniture which he plans to get cheap or free where he can.

Now we have to learn how the government views it taxwise - is this a "vacation home" or a "second home" or what? It's not a "rental" I should think unless we are renting to ourselves?   How large of a bite will they be taking from it so we can make sure we can afford the taxes?  Time to research the taxation labyrinth.  :-p 

Can't believe how the time is whipping along - hubby leaves this next weekend for San Diego and we're scrambling to resolve what to do with our fleet of aging vehicles when he is no longer here to play whack-a-mole with automotive whatnot as the in-house mechanic.   Spent today dredging out personal stuff and cleaning up the interiors of two of them, we got pics of one and it goes up for sale tomorrow with the other right behind it.  A third has so little value it hardly seems worth selling, but it does run so we may offer it for dirt-cheap so see if some tinkering college student might want it.  He's prepping a fourth to be his driving car for down south, and trying to finish fixing my big '78 wagon in the garage so it can be sold later on too.

In the midst of all this, I get to go car shopping for a newer car that will be taken care of by a 'real' mechanic instead!  All of my cars are old enough to both vote and drink, so looking at a 2007 Subaru tomorrow feels like a visit to the land of the Jetsons!  I hope it works out, it would be nice to have one reliable car instead of hopping back and forth between three of them depending on which one is running this week.

Hmm - combo of hubby out of work and kids all prepping to get on their own, kind of feels like a transition in the making. I can feel my deeper roots pulling up, the edges of my routine becoming just a wee, teensy bit blurry. We'd thought of downsizing our home in about five years, perhaps it will simply be moved up the timeline a bit.

Started fixing up my church library to slowly get it up to snuff for eventual handoff, also re-painting the church parking lot for maybe my last time as I only re-do it every 3-4 years.

Having a garage sale in July too, which is a good start in that whole process. Sort of like drawing a comb over my household to get out the tangles, amazing the things I have and don't need anymore (or never really needed in the first place). I'll probably be maundering about that here from time to time over the next couple years. If I must move, a slow and gentle drifting from the dock and an amble down the river is always preferred to a tsunami.